A Poem for Three Voices

Setting:  A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:
I am slow as the world.  I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen?  I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me.  I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:
When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.
I watched the men walk about me in the office.  They were so flat!
There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,
That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed--and the cold angels, the abstractions.
I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed:  'Have you seen something awful?
You are so white, suddenly.'  And I said nothing.
I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.
I could not believe it.  Is it so difficult
For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?
The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed
From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.
I am dying as I sit.  I lose a dimension.
Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!
The silver track of time empties into the distance,
The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.
These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.
Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs.  I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.
Again, this is a death.  Is it the air,
The particles of destruction I **** up?  Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then?  This death, this death?
As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.
Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death?

THIRD VOICE:
I remember the minute when I knew for sure.
The willows were chilling,
The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine--
It had a consequential look, like everything else,
And all I could see was dangers:  doves and words,
Stars and showers of gold--conceptions, conceptions!
I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,
Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.
There is a snake in swans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready.  The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that.  It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:
It is a world of snow now.  I am not at home.
How white these sheets are.  The faces have no features.
They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,
Those little sick ones that elude my arms.
Other children do not touch me:  they are terrible.
They have too many colors, too much life.  They are not quiet,
Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances.  I have tried and tried.
I have stitched life into me like a rare *****,
And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
I have tried not to think too hard.  I have tried to be natural.
I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,
Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,
Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look.  But still the face was there,
The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,
The face of the dead one that could only be perfect
In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.
And then there were other faces.  The faces of nations,
Governments, parliaments, societies,
The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:
They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!  They are jealous gods
That would have the whole world flat because they are.
I see the Father conversing with the Son.
Such flatness cannot but be holy.
'Let us make a heaven,' they say.
'Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.'

FIRST VOICE:
I am calm.  I am calm.  It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors.  It is so quiet here.
The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.
Voices stand back and flatten.  Their visible hieroglyphs
Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.
They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown.  I am a seed about to break.
The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:
It does not wish to be more, or different.
Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.
O color of distance and forgetfulness!--
When will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids.  It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea.  Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness
Frightened the mind.  They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.
They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks.  It is not happy.
'This is where you will come when you are ready.'
The night lights are flat red moons.  They are dull with blood.
I am not ready for anything to happen.
I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:
There is no miracle more cruel than this.
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last.  I last it out.  I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,
The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.
I am the center of an atrocity.
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence **** and ****?  It milks my life.
The trees wither in the street.  The rain is corrosive.
I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,
The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers
With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.
I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.
I shall be a sky and a hill of good:  O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.  There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness.  I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick.  It is thick with this working.
I am used.  I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:
I am accused.  I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies.  I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing.  And now the world conceives
Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.
It is a love of death that sickens everything.
A dead sun stains the newsprint.  It is red.
I lose life after life.  The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all.  So she supports us,
Fattens us, is kind.  Her mouth is red.
I know her.  I know her intimately--
Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.
Men have used her meanly.  She will eat them.
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The sun is down.  I die.  I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:
Who is he, this blue, furious boy,
Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star?
He is looking so angrily!
He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.
The blue color pales.  He is human after all.
A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;
They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath.
I shall not let go.
There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:
There is the moon in the high window.  It is over.
How winter fills my soul!  And that chalk light
Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,
Empty schoolrooms, empty churches.  O so much emptiness!
There is this cessation.  This terrible cessation of everything.
These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers--
What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless.  Restless and useless.  I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north.  I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack.  I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it.  I cannot contain my life.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.
I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,
Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces
Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.
I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.
The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars
That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:
I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.
She is crying through the glass that separates us.
She is crying, and she is furious.
Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.
It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.
She is crying at the dark, or at the stars
That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,
A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.
And from the open mouth issue sharp cries
Scratching at my sleep like arrows,
Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.
My daughter has no teeth.  Her mouth is wide.
It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:
What is it that flings these innocent souls at us?
Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out
In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,
The little silver trophies they've come so far for.
There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.
Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;
They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.
Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.
They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.
I see them showering like stars on to the world--
On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,
These pure, small images.  They smell of milk.
Their footsoles are untouched.  They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal?
Here is my son.
His wide eye is that general, flat blue.
He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.
One cry.  It is the hook I hang on.
And I am a river of milk.
I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:
I am not ugly.  I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.
It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.
I am one in five, something like that.  I am not hopeless.
I am beautiful as a statistic.  Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.
The red mouth I put by with my identity
A day ago, two days, three days ago.  It was a Friday.
I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.
I can love my husband, who will understand.
Who will love me through the blur of my deformity
As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless.  So I walk
Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.
And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.
The body is resourceful.
The body of a starfish can grow back its arms
And newts are prodigal in legs.  And may I be
As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:
She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,
And I am a white ship hooting:  Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing.  It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
        tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush.  There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go.
I leave my health behind.  I leave someone
Who would adhere to me:  I undo her fingers like bandages:  I go.

SECOND VOICE:
I am myself again.  There are no loose ends.
I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.
I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,
Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I.  It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:
How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?
How long can I be
Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,
Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon?
The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow
Lap at my back ineluctably.
How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?
How long can my hands
Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words
Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?
It is a terrible thing
To be so open:  it is as if my heart
Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:
Today the colleges are drunk with spring.
My black gown is a little funeral:
It shows I am serious.
The books I carry wedge into my side.
I had an old wound once, but it is healing.
I had a dream of an island, red with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back.  They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows.  I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured.  I am reassured.
These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,
The talking ducks, the happy lambs.
I am simple again.  I believe in miracles.
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.
They are not mine.  They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.
I shall meditate upon my little son.
He does not walk. &n

time is
the space in which we grow
   without awareness
   in our early years
structured by meals
   arrivals and departures
   light and dark
   hot and cold
   school   studies  play  adventures
   celebrations
and by waiting
   anxiously or not
for things to happen

time is
that feeling
that we may not have enough of it
in our later years
busy with jobs and family and travel
covering long distances in order to
achieve and educate and care

time is
what starts to rush by us
with increasing speed
in our final years
making us wonder
what it really means

that space
by which we measure
our lives
   our universes
      our worlds

time is

In the supermarket airport
There are arrivals every day.
The departures in your trolley
Come to you from far away.

Those brightly coloured vegetables
Have sat around for days
In what we’re told are
such hygienic backroom bays.
They’re obviously picked and packed by well paid sprites and elves!
Then magically appear on your supermarket shelves.

Here every carrot is straight and clean
And every lettuce crisply curled
Then gassed in plastic packets
That are filling up our world!

Take a glance inside your trolley
And if what I say is true
Then I guarantee the food within
Has seen more of the world than you.

Like the picture on the packet
Of your frozen ready meal
The colour of this far flown food is great
The taste experience, surreal.

Those ripe tomatoes in their reddest skins
We should dye brown, to match their taste
Those vivid orange carrots are a mystery of flavour-
What a waste!

A plate of vibrant promising hue
Can taste of packaging and glue.

The supermarket tells you you’re in clover
But its goods have all the texture of an old pullover.
Your supermarket says that it is catering for you
But if you’re honest do you really think that’s true?
If you don’t then there is something you can do.

At the supermarket airport
All the money’s in departures
So put that trolley back
And just depart.
If you're wanting to be vocal
Then shop seasonal and local
And hit these psuedo airports at their heart.

Autumn Angel, bring in fall,
see me, like me, text me, call.
Connection made is strong and now,
life comes quickly, she comes how?
Traveling vessels far and near,
planes and ferries bring us here.
Walking, waiting I grow eager,
business first before I meet her.
In the district lounge I perch,
finding me will end her search.
Her approach was my delight,
for now, we can begin our night.
Strong and vibrant she is ample,
allure and wares for me to sample.
Pints and chatter, Blue Ribbon prize,
my glare is locked into her eyes.
Her exchanges are so charming,
pleasant, light and not-alarming.
Time has come to find our way,
joined departure, plans to play?
Lodging and rides arranged by phone,
She knows her way, away from home.
5th floor shoe box, now our lair,
pajamas, toothbrush I’m prepared.
Netflix and chill is common trend,
Hulu and hold is our new friend.
I lay beside her, still not sure.
She watched her show, as I watched her.
I longed to kiss her neck and ears,
doubtful hindrance of my fears.
Surely right, it must be so,
She wants me here, and this means go.
I slowly start to kiss her lobes,
Her standing neck hairs brush my nose.
My mouth, it waters, for her kiss,
She turns to me and grants me this.
Her constellations are so bright,
Her moles like stars, I count tonight.
Her lips transport me to this place,
where there’s no time but only space.
I’d live here for a thousand moons.
sadly, departures come too soon.
Our time is short, not long enough,
I touched her face, she felt my scruff.
Constant contact, senses aflame,
I want her more, she feels the same.
Her essence sweet like summer flowers,
I found the center of her powers.
Far inside, my fingers reach,
while I explored her weeping peach.
Touching, tasting, and some teasing,
Her satisfaction, was my pleasing.
I want to give her more of me,
the part that daylight never sees.
I gave myself the best I could
& tried to make her feel so good.
My comfort lies in her content,
She understands, our needs were met.
Lying by her was so free,
I love the way she feels by me.
Alongside slumber was so grand,
snoozing blissful, hand in hand.
Several times I would awake,
was so pleased with my evenings fate.
When light began to fill the room,
we knew that we’d be going soon.
We didn’t want to leave this place,
I planted kisses on her face.
Once again we shared in pleasures,
in life, these are important treasures.
The final moment had arrived,
we packed our bags, prepared to drive.
The sun shone like no other day,
as we drove down towards the bay.
I sadly had to disembark,
but kissed her more while we were parked.
We said goodbye and rightly so,
our faces had a special glow.
This magic evening, all a blur,
more vessels take us where we were.

Time apart makes all things
New - a nervousness
An excitement
Needy and naive
The memory of your touch
Fades - but not the intensity
Of my love

Checking like clockwork
The departures and arrivals
Heart thumping
My poor vision
A true handicap
Scanning the masses
For the most familiar face
In the world
Of whom I know
The span between my thumb and index
Is the same as your chin to earlobe
And my finger could trace the shape of your lips
From memory alone.

When my eyes
Settle upon your face
My hard heart beat
Hits slow motion
And stops -
Everything runs through my mind
But I think nothing at all
Reach out.
Kiss.

Moored to the same ring:
The hour, the darkness and I,
Our compasses hooded like falcons.

Now the memory of you comes aching in
With a wash of broken bits which never left port
In which once we planned voyages,
They come knocking like hearts asking:
What departures on this tide?

Breath of land, warm breath,
You tighten the cold around the navel,
Though all shores but the first have been foreign,
And the first was not home until left behind.

Our choice is ours but we have not made it,
Containing as it does, our destination
Circled with loss as with coral, and
A destination only until attained.

I have left you my hope to remember me by,
Though now there is little resemblance.
At this moment I could believe in no change,
The mast perpetually
Vacillating between the same constellations,
The night never withdrawing its dark virtue
>From the harbor shaped as a heart,
The sea pulsing as a heart,
The sky vaulted as a heart,
Where I know the light will shatter like a cry
Above a discovery:
"Emptiness.
Emptiness!  Look!"
Look.  This is the morning.

Departures and Arrivals.
The dust hasn't yet settled on the torn up trail behind me.
Particles still linger in my hair, my teeth and in the air
around me like they own me.
I wonder, even though it seems like I've dearly departed, if it
will ever settle and  I don't necessarily expect it to because
maybe it has to sock it to me
so no sweet amnesia can shew away the memories of what it was
that got me here to this place of growing respect for all the
potholes and all the unpaved roads.

Driving in the dark tree monsters slide bye one after the other,
their silent dialogue giving me the shivers like so many other
things in the world do,
cold sweat running down my face as the  car rattles and  the
music stops and there's only the sound of dripping rain. Tears,
like rain aren't separate  from  sweat.
They're constanly recycling  and bleeding into one another like
night bleeds into day. I get that and I even love that because where
does hardship go if  not to tears?

Stuffing grief into the cracks of the bodymind is a recipe for sick. I get
that too. People may tell ya to take a pill, have a swig, do anything to
bully your discomfort away but you sense
and you know that you sense and only you can sense what it is you
have to do. So you keep on going because what has drinking  the
sweet numbing  Koolaide ever done for ya anyway?

And it's a relief to come out of the comatose to watch the rose-gold
sunrise coming up over your landscape as your gears shift on the
broken hill of this awakening;
laser sharp beams of light gutting the nonsense out of ya, your feet
touching down onto solid  ground  and you feeling shaky but all
aglow in your skin
and this departure is telling every cell in your body that you have arrived.
There will be other departures and other arrivals, other days and other
nights but for now,
in this moment you have arrived and you don't give a **** about and
you're almost grateful for the dust and the  particles and the freaky
and the the not so freaky  fallout hovering over ya like a halo

1/2020

What are fingertips but pulses and pauses?
A spinal sigh---a cradle to all existence?

The punchline of all sensory implications,
the culmination of our tangles and departures?

All flesh is ephemeral, soft to shards in hours;
Touch is but a ****** tendril in memoriam for desire.

coloring inside the lines is impossibly bleak,
with a hissing noise
atomic locomotive
rounds the bend,
extrasensory perception is not
a mindless gift,
it's a train station in the clouds,
tracking all my starting points to you,
nothing in the middle,
nothing at the end.

you leave in opera
with secrets and grievances
under the radar,
and your ready-made
wings catch in the power lines,
you're coiling like smoke
in the arches of my cathedral,
a sense of elegant decay
while sweeping up the debris,
committing arson
with the paraffin of my temporal lobe.

yesterday's fairground waltzes,
ghosted lullabies,
and woodland hymnals,
set in a context not of
resolution and closure,
but of contradiction and assimilation,
break the bond,
away they float on purveyor belts,
one too many molecules,
one too many departures,
always on the surface of everything,
nothing in the middle,
nothing at the end.

Our hands rise
and the street leaps.
Our eyes lower,
the heavens collapse.

From our unspoken pain,
a tulip tree grows
mysteriously behind us.

From our cherished wishes,
a star rises
just beyond our reach.

Do you hear the bullets
whizzing around our heads
guarding our kisses?

The sweetness
of your glance
never ends.

No birds fly south
from your eyes;
no avalanches slide
from your *******.

In the paradise
of your sight
the sun never sets.

These are your lips
I return to your neck.

Your blood
burns in my heart.

Everything remains.

"Have you forgotten your ticket... or your luggage?"
Because I wish you did.
I wish we both Had forgotten everything behind, included clothes,
and this bench was a bed, a small bed, so you would have to sleep on my chest.
Tomorrow will be another day. Tomorrow will be another day without check in, without gates, without running, without reading books,
without delays, without waiting queues, without sweat, without planes landing, without the morbid wishes for a plane to crash, without escalatores everywhere, without you.
How I hate airports... How I love airports.
******* Airports... full of their welcome laughs and goodbye tears, their happy endings and melodramatics departures.
The sad concept of living it's all condensed in this place. You are never happy with what you got till you are sad for what you lost.
But I was happy with you. I was happy at the Dublin Airport.

Isn't it sad
How we
Can spend
A lot of
Time together
Yet know
Next to nothing
About
Each another.
This though,
Is not the time
To reminisce.
Earlier this
Morning you
Told me that
You were leaving.
It came in not
As bomb that
Levels cities,
No, it was more
Like a baseball
That broke through
The stained-glass windows
Of my heart.
This does
Not **** me,
But day in
And day out,
I am burdened
By the gaping
Hole in me.
I pick the
Shards of glass,
Stained with
Memories and
Mysteries.
I only ask
To know you more.
I try to put
The shards together
Enduring all
The cuts to my
Fingers.
Cuts of different
Sizes, some are
Deep and some
Are shallow
But all draw blood
The same.
I Persevere
through the pain
To rebuild
That perfect
Picture.
To see the
Mystery
Unravel before
Me.
To put together
The pieces of
Your identity.
Isn't it sad
How we
Can spend
A lot of
Time together
Yet know
Next to nothing
About
Each another.
I only ask
To know you more.
Someday perhaps,
I would see
your hands,
Whose scars
Would gladly
Open again,
And help me
Fix this broken
Memory.

ARRIVALS & DEPARTURES

( for Bud on his birthday that was never to be )

Never to be
met by you again

at the airport
with a hastily scribbled sign:

"WAITING FOR GOD...
KNOWS WHO!"

Or telling me you were
expecting the Cat in the Hat.

One year a tip-top topper...
...the next a battered bowler.

Always. . .
your smile

my gold coin

your laughter
my treasure.

"Ahhhh Jaysus, Bud...tears?"
cries the ghost of you.

"It's all I get these days!
Dying is so...annoying!"

"Oh, before I go. . !"
the ghost of you smirks

before fading away
into an EXIT sign.

"I love the purple
fedora!"

Heatwave.

Dust whirling,
after mobile departures,
in the decadence
of our innumerous crows'-feet.

The sweat of humidity
dropping on neutrally carpeted floors.

Beer lubricating
many a rusty throat
as human optimism
and pessimism
make friends with each other
in a warlike fashion.

"Death interrupts life;
it calls on everyone of us",
Unexpected yet long awaited.
Don't they say?It's not the destination
but the journey on which you go.
That would make us all,
but travelers
wandering a lonesome road.
Is it lonesome?
And what is lonely?
Have I never felt these thing
if I have friends,
people.
And yet I am, ultimately.
For, when you go, you go on your own.
Or arrive
       -whichever it may be...

of innocent and
illicit meetings,

of scalding coffee
and **** cider,

of October air
and goosebumps,

of piercing stares
and demure blushes,

of nervous laughter
and bright eyed smiles,

of beautiful stupidity
and exquisite risk taking,

of sweet shyness
and hesitant touches,

of passionate giving
and exhausted joy,

of shared secrets
and utter honesty,

of motorcycle rides
and smiling skulls,

of early morning coffee
and late night magic tricks,

of story telling
and musical laughter,

of leopard spots
and three quick kisses,

of secret meetings
and getting caught,

of forbidden words
and transparent hearts,

of hands wiping
away escaped tears,

of sad departures
and naked good byes,

of miles and miles
of never ending distance,

of long awaited phone calls
and lengthy emails,

of sleepless nights
and lonely days,

of miles and miles
that separate,

of silence,

of war,

of long awaited contact,

of letters,

of wounds,

of silence,

of deafening silence,

of love

of heart ache.

1)   Zushi and Anju


Zushio
my son
where are you now?
Anju
most delicate flower
where do you rest your head?

Zushio
strident and strong
are you still alive
and do you
think of your mother?
O son
do you keep your father’s words
and do you look after your little sister?

Anju my delicate love
where do you blossom now?
Your presence always fills my heart
but you are not where
I may hold you, my lovely child

O Zushio
are you with your sister?
do you still care for her
and does Anju grow to be strong
and  brave?
O Zushio - is Anju within your shadow
or has fate parted even the two of you
as it has parted us all?

Zushio
my son
where are you now?
Anju
most delicate flower
where do you rest your head?



2)  Live brother

Live, brother -
and go now, for
you must go seek mother;
seek her where she is abused
in Sato;
and Oh - what they have done
to our mother, a woman without her man
one cannot know
But O brother,
find mother and give her back her life
and as for me
our masters cannot extract any word
about where you hide and what you intend
and how you escaped  
for all they will find
is water in my mouth and in my body
for I will be in water
as when I lived in mother’s womb
But live you brother, and flee
and hide till they think you are gone
and seek our dear mother
and free her
and give her back the life  
give her the precious gift of life
the same precious life
she gave you and me



3) Come home to mother


Zushio
O Anju
dearest children
where are you?
are you well?
has time been
a gentle foster mum
or a witch that eats
children’s hearts?
O Zushio
O Anju
children
of the just -
do you think of mother
and does your father’s wise words
still reside in your hearts?
O Zushio
O Anju
dearest children
where do you sleep at nights
and what do you wake up to each day?
Zushio
O Anju
my children
come home to mother
for always I wait for you



4)     Way of the just


Yes Sirs,
I know you say
it is easier
to live the life of the unjust
to protect one’s own comfort
and powers and position
and seek to satisfy one’s own appetites
and be one with the group to secure oneself
and keep the less fortunate out
and to increase one’s own fortunes and ease
by increasing the powers of one’s group -
but Sirs,
I have taught my children
and I live what I teach:
Let justice be one’s way
and do good to all
though it may be inconvenient to oneself…

And now, Sirs,
you have come to teach me
for you would do good to none but to your own group
for the good you do your group will protect you
though others may crawl the earth in misery;  
but I, Sirs - I find it easier
to walk what you call
the difficult way of inconvenience




5)   Satisfy my desires


Come woman
you must satisfy man’s desires
and fill the pockets of your master

You have not learned this
and you yearn after
your husband and children
far removed;
and ungrateful to your owner
you run off from the quarters

It takes time
woman
it takes energy and resources
and money to drag you back
and it stirs rebellion amongst the other girls

It is simple, you see:
you must satisfy man’s desires
and fill the pockets of your master;
and it is even simpler:
you break a rule
we break your feet;
we cut your tendons
so you can never run
You’ll be made useless to yourself
if you are determined to be useless to the owner
And you’ll be an example
to the other girls
an example to inspire fear and obedience

Come woman
teach by example:
you must satisfy man’s desires
and fill the pockets of your master




6) Zushio and mother



SON:

O mother
forgive me your son
for I could not bring sister
alive back to you
for time delivered her
into the hands of the unjust
and she chose a lake
as her burial ground;
father died in his exile
and all I bring to you now is myself
with nothing in my hands
for poverty and misery has been the reward
of the just and the righteous;
I lived by father’s words
of compassion and love and justice -
O dearest mother,
and the world proved a cruel master




MOTHER:

Though we are left
with nothing the world can see
nothing the world can measure by
there is the love one has…
O Zushio, my child -
and may that love sustain me, you
and may that love sustain all beings;
O Zuhsio, my child
see your life’s journey this way:
May no harm befall any being
may all beings live in peace;
may all beings be happy
and no harm ever come to one  
through my deeds and actions




7 )   Sansho’s philosophy


one comes to this life  
and one must seek comfort
and ease and one’s status
and this comes through careful nurture
and meticulous culture;
wealth and power flows from one to another
and one’s ease comes through the  discomfort of the other –
the fool must fill the coffers of the cunning;
the weak must prop up the strong
and so this is the secret of life
and one must  seek a group that can sustain one
and one must sustain that group too
and so keep all others in place under thumb, toe and fist
and so that  the ease one comes to in life
flows constant like the rich living rivers





8)   The family

There may be journeys we undertake;
there will be long departures
and separations
There will be pain and agony
and each may be taken
from the other
And yet, yet - O gentle heart
yet the bonds will live and bring back one to one;
yet the bonds of mother, child, father, brother and sister
these bonds will surpass all pain;
and the family, that bond of love
that will live, that love will radiate
no matter what the world shall deal and ******
into one’s hearts and hands
O hold on to that love
that love of father, son
man, woman
mother and daughter and brother and sister
for that is all, that love is all that lasts and endures

the attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
poem
is a strange animal

with lines
monosyllabically
short
and then
perilously   freakishly    faulknerically
long
but not to worry

the trick is to ***** around
with the readers' heads a bit
let them wonder
   what's going on
get them used to
   obnoxious departures
   sudden jolts
      of expression
   devious detours into
     obscenity, indecency

these are the
tourette's moments
of a poet's creative life:
a move to keep those with the
attention span of an infant gnat
awake  alive  responsive

some may expect poetry
to take them down
safe  bland  routes:
         a snowfall enhanced by red robins
         perched on a rustic fence

         a lake with canoeing lovers cooing
         in a shimmering moment
          
         heartfelt elegies
         quaint quatrains
         hip haikus

but can these images
really keep you entranced?

well, can they?

it isn't like i didn't warn you
or the horse you rode in on

I'm on the runway,
Taxiing as they say;
But I can't remember
If I'm coming or going;
Deporting or boarding;
Lifting off or landing.
All runways look alike,
All security checks the same;
I'll know where I'm going
When I reach the baggage claim.

I see faces and flowers
on loose pages—
it smiles at me from
a crumpled paper, addressed
to the fire, its embers were
keeping it ablaze.

How happy it was to paint the
room blue in the middle of summer,
dancing through the sound of the creaks
under my footsteps— everything is just right.

How treacherous it was, a wistful memory
they were remnants of unsettled stories
and unforgiven departures; I stood
on a shipwreck
where everything is a lost.
the uncertainty would be tall
and I am more will for the fall,
are these things crosses your mind?
I wouldn't bear crossing out your name.

This is how we paint room blue; creeping
on the cracks of the floor, memorizing your
gaits as I follow your traces.

Catch the motes of dust in light
To feel the threads of time suspend,
In serenade of life’s allure
Where precious moments never end.

Silver tears run down the cheek
In swift departures curled embrace,
Poingnancy for moments few
Of entwined limbs and whiskered face.

Separations loneliness
In gnawing of the very soul,
The wish for time to dissipate
To make the separate halves a whole.

Anticipation’s rawness now
Throws arrowed light to early shroud,
The eagerness to touch and kiss
Brings clear blue sky to morning cloud.

Rationalize the wonderment
Of slender fingers through your hair,
In fantasy of sheer delight
Her silhouette reflected there.

Hold the tantalizing heat
Of tender fires of passion bound
In throngs of longing, deeply felt,
Within the belly’s tufted mound

Exhaustion in the tangled sheet
As bands of sunlight kiss your hair,
Gently now, in drifted sleep
And gales of pleasure fill the air.

Catch the motes of dust in light
To feel the threads of time suspend
In serenade of life’s allure
Where precious moments never end.


Marshalg
Victoria Park tunnel
Auckland
24 July 2010

i hate layovers, the long stops
the nothingness of the in betweens
suffocating of boredom
surrounded by strangers
all anxiously waiting

there is a universal oneness here
regardless of race, religion or age
something which everyone endures
a temporary pause in time
where reflection is forced upon us

reminiscing of what we bid farewell to
and the hope, love, fear or excitement
awaiting us at our next stop

Every time
I start anew,
or decide
to leave,
without fail I arrive
at a new beginning.
                           Every start
                           is an end-
                           of something.
                          Each arrival,
                          culminates in a departure,
                                                 fallen in to  the cycle of
                                                 'samsara'
                                                 vagrant mind, plays
                                                creates illusions;
                                                ends and beginnings.
When the karma wheel completes its circles,
without thinking, consciousness merges with 
 the ocean of                                                       eternal being
arrivals and departures mean nothing,
If  
consciousness  is still and unmoving,  in the point between
birth                                       and                                       death.

Alas it was but in that moment, when your soul cascaded into the night sky, that I understood what a goodbye truly meant. A chill crawled down my spine as your body grew colder by the minute beneath my touch; a solemn awakening on my conscience as grief greeted me yet again. This familiar path I feared to embark on again has resurfaced, baring with its somber recollections - I witnessed you…finally at rest.

Her arms would never turn the corner to greet me as I landed from my flight,
The warmth in her laughter shall fall to silent ears as the house ceases to echo,
Those eyes would never challenge the radiance of the sun again,
For it was in this moment I embraced the season of change, the art of letting go.

Letting go is a natural part of life that arises in manners we may never consider. May it be a goodbye placed upon a past lover, a former roommate, an old apartment, even a job site - goodbyes signify the end of a chapter. 2023 bore many moments of letting go for me as I relished in the art of departure. I lost my grandmother, the woman who raised me. This emotion was overwhelming as it marked the beginning of her legacy that I am now adorned to live. I have encountered many moments of goodbye this year: moving states, a heartbreaking end to a relationship, ending a program, seeking a new field of employment, ending a friendship - the list is exhaustive. Yet, it wasn’t until the passing of my grandmother I truly recognized the beauty of letting go.

The art of departure entails embracing what once was whilst creating space for what is to come. Letting go is freeing yourself of expectations - rather having abundant expectancy.

It all led up to this moment,
The dedication we casted our ambitions in,
The triumphs we rooted our adversities in,
It brought us to the next chapter of our lives,
And for you I'm forever grateful to,
Thanks for joining me on my journey.

The California dream is what we were living,
From the adventurous summer splendor,
To the heartfelt bittersweet departures,
Those unified celebratory cheers,
It was summer 21' of unprecedented affection,
Onto the next phase of life we go where unknown possibilities lie dormant,
Here's to the discoveries to come,
The gratitude to bestow,
& memories we'll create.